Melissa Thompson, MBA

Health/Care Strategist, Cancer Patient Advocate

Melissa Thompson is a recent breast cancer survivor, health/care strategist and serial entrepreneur, as well as a global advocate for innovation and exponential progress in healthcare and cancer education, research and treatment. 

As a strategist, Melissa works with organizations through the lens of a patient, entrepreneur, and innovator to shape their business and technology strategies, ensuring that patients remain at the center of care in product development, go-to-market strategies, technology, and marketing. The companies with which she works range from neurodiagnostic medical devices to middleware software as a hospital's value-based care management tool.

Melissa is a Patient Advocate for the National Cancer Institute. She also sits on the Patient and Family Advisory Committee (PFACQ) at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Melissa is the Vice Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Center for Healthcare Innovation, Women in Healthcare & Life Sciences, a global initiative to promote STEM education. For the American Cancer Society, Melissa Chairs the Relay for Life Greenwich and Fund the Cure. She is a member of ACS's Young Professionals Against Cancer, a committee member of Women's Leading the Way to Wellness, and a volunteer for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. Melissa is a member of the Greenwich Medical Reserve Corps, the Society for Participatory Medicine, and an active patient advocate with ACS CAN, the National Patient Advocate Foundation, and The Beryl Institute.

Melissa was the founder and CEO of TalkSession – a healthcare technology platform that virtually integrated mental healthcare providers with patients, using superior predictive analytics for remote patient monitoring and care. 

Melissa was lauded with the awards of Entrepreneur of the Year and Innovator of the Year, by the International Women in Business Awards in 2013. Melissa was selected as a “Healthcare Transformer” for the GE & StartUp Health Academy and is an active alumna of non-profit, Springboard Enterprises’ Life Sciences.

WIRED’s Dec. 2013 issue featured TalkSession, guest-curated by Bill Gates, as a game-changing company and technology under Gates’ headline essay, “Let’s Fix the World." In September 2013, TalkSession was highlighted by the White House as an innovative technology that would change the future of behavioral healthcare in a presentation attended by President Barack Obama and live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov.

Previously, Melissa was an Analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Melissa blogs about her cancer experiences at Tumors and a Tot. She is also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, Forbes, Wearable World and the New York Daily News and is often featured on CNBC, and Fox News as an expert in wearable technology, healthcare, and technology innovation. 

Melissa holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, a BA in Economics and Chinese from Barnard College, Columbia University, and studied at the University of Int'l Business and Economics in Beijing, China. She has taken additional coursework at Yale School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Cancer Biology, Breast Cancer, Genomic Data, and Data Science.

She resides in Connecticut.